The actual lines of code in an OS has balooned exponentially. Of course we can’t discount the abilities of the average software engineer in the 90s vs now. I’d guess back then you had to be fairly driven and smart to be employed there, which is not necessarily true anymore. If you have a pulse and can barely pass fizz buzz you’re employed with 200k salary, so yeah.
I most definitely know more people than I would prefer who can only barely pass fizz buzz and make more than that. It is kinda interesting how dev compensation is in fact bimodal and the engineers (and the managers) in the second hump want to actively avoid any mention of the possibility that they’re under compensated.
> If you have a pulse and can barely pass fizz buzz you’re employed with 200k salary
If this was true; it is not an "efficient market" we are observing, neither in SaaS or developer employment. These companies would be outcompeted. The underlying mechanism that enables this is probably SaaS/etc lock-in.
Will be interesting to see what/how overturns whatever paradigm this is.
Every once and then they buy a startup to inject themselves with new blood and maintain their dominance. They also need to have decent leadershipt to make the right decisions (eg. I'm sure Ballmer would have killed M$).
They can afford all those useless employees because software allow you to get lots of profit with little work.
